Youtubers Plead Guilty For Illegal Gambling

UK Gambling Commission charges against 2 popular UK Youtubers have finally been concluded. After quite some time spent discussing everything related to the incident, the 2 popular Youtubers, Craig “Nepenthez” Douglas and Dylan Rigby plead guilty of all charges. Those included advertising unlawful gambling, introducing children to gambling and facilitating unlawful gambling. After pleading guilty, the two now face astronomic fees of roughly $330,000 with legal fees and rates included in the number.

The Story Behind…

Mr. Douglas has received lots of criticism in late 2015 when people started confronting him about his illegal actions. At first, he ignored them as long as he could. After some time, he most likely was sick and tired of it all so he told his critics to “go annoy someone else”. Unfortunately, that was the beginning of his downfall since he was charged by the UK Gambling Commission shortly after that. The first charge accused Mr. Rigby of operating an illegal FIFA betting site. I’m sure most of you are well familiar with it. It is called FUTGalaxy and was massively popular back in the days. In addition to charges facing Mr. Rigby, Mr. Douglas was accused of advertising the site towards minors… and we all know what laws say about underaged people gambling.

UKGC Issued a Discussing Paper

What’s worst of all is the fact that shortly before (In August 2016) the events described above, UK Gambling Commission released a paper discussing virtual currencies and their use in illegal gambling facilitation. You can check it out here. Long story short, the paper addresses the issues of virtual in-game currencies and their possible effects on illegal and underage gambling. These issues are big problems for the entire eSports betting industry and regulatory organizations are doing their best to keep them at bay.

What could this mean for eSports betting?

Well, I am sure some of you (if not all) are already familiar with the huge number of eSports gambling-related incidents in the last couple of months. It is safe to say that Valve got the worst of it all since they pretty much went through hell itself. All due to illegal skin gambling operations from various third party websites that used Steam’s API for their business. This resulted in a shutdown of illegal skin betting websites. Up to this day, just a few of them remain. A few which managed to temporarily bypass Valve’s new security measures. With that being said, it is difficult to predict what could these new charges against those 2 young UK men bring to eSports betting. One thing is for sure, illegal forms of eSports betting are finally coming to an end!

About the Author:Article written by Hipster Jesus, eSports enthusiast and an active member of the CS: GO community. In his free time, he likes to rush B on competitive servers and scream “CYKA BLYAT” at trolls. Contact “Hipster Jesus” on Twitter.